Interview with Gabriela Lena Frank
Part Four: On the Creative Life Span, and the Fear of Repeating Herself
Fourth of an eight-part interview by YoWangdu’s Yolanda O’Bannon
YO: I’m surprised to hear how much focus you have on doing new things, learning new skills for yourself. It sounds like it’s really key.
GLF: I noticed exactly that about myself too – I have this great fear of repeating myself. If I did something already in one piece – someone can just go to that piece and play it to get it. Why do I have to write the second piece? Why is there a reason for that to exist? To make money? To get paid again?
YO: What’s your great fear, though? Being boring?
GLF: It seems dishonest.
YO: Oh, dishonest.
GLF: Cheating.
YO: Cheating by using the same thing?
GLF: Yeah, I’m cheating.
YO: You lazy dog.
GLF: I’m lazy. I’m a bad, sneaky person.
YO: Gabriela Lena Frank, bad…
GLF: Bad, sneaky composer! [laughing]…I feel terrible.
YO: That’s hilarious.
GLF: Privately, I’m very hard on other composers – I look at their stuff, and I’m like, that’s the same piece.
YO & GLF: Bad, sneaky composer! [laughing]
GLF: But, you know, that’s different from knowingly making arrangements. I have a violin piano piece. A Brazilian flutist friend heard it and said that would work great for flute. Can you make an arrangement for flute and piano? I was like, what? But I did, and now I don’t know which version I like better. And, ironically, in that violin/piano piece, I was trying to make a violin sound like a flute. And so it was like in many ways returning it to its original idea. I don’t feel sneaky for that, I mean, making an arrangement.
Other instrumentalists might be, oh, I want to get my hands on that. It’s coming from a good place. They just want to play it, too. Guitarists make arrangements of piano pieces all the time. Harp, with guitar and piano music. I mean, like instruments are often arranged. To me it’s like spreading the wealth a bit. But, mining from something because you couldn’t go through the pain of coming up with something new. To me, that’s cheating. So I am always trying to do new stuff. One of the reasons I have problems with procrastinating, is that I’m like, god, I just finished that piece, I need to decompress. I need to do some others things that will get me new ideas again. I’m gonna repeat myself. It’s also a dilemma I have when a piece that I’ve written 10 years ago is being played today by somebody, and it’s so new for them, but for me it’s not new anymore.
You know how you get jingles in your head and they drive you nuts? With 10 years worth of music, I have some of that problem. So I like having a distance from my stuff, a certain kind of distance. And I can’t if I have to answer questions about that piece. I’ll go in and I’ll coach a string quartet playing something, or an orchestra playing something, and the last thing I want to do is listen to that music again, because I have a deadline for a new piece, and all that stuff, because it’s so intimate, goes GaZong! And it’s in my head again. It’s like trying new recipes…I just have to open a book randomly and just buy all those weird ingredients and just do it. To kinda get out of your mode of comfort…to do something new.
Now, these are all good problems. It means that I have stuff happening. It means that I’m not bereft, but this is exactly the point, right where I am, exactly the point where you see artists plateau. Because everything is additive – when they’re still new enough, still young enough – anything they’re doing is growing. It’s about this point that you see artists plateauing – starting to repeat themselves. It’s a brain thing, too, your brain is getting older. It’s everything. So you have to do the equivalent of brain exercises, to shocking yourself, randomly and very logically. I’ve been very interested lately in looking the overall lifespan of creative peoples’ lives and seeing when they were most creative, and how did they keep going, and personal life at the same time. Were they happily married? Did they have children? Did they have other interests? That kind of thing. It tells me a lot. I think the artist’s life is very organic of what’s happening personally. I don’t buy into this notion of being an alcoholic or addict and finding artistic inspiration in that.
YO: I was kind of horrified to read about how scientists or mathematicians peak really early…
GLF: Before 30. That scared me too. I’ve heard that.
YO: That’s horrible. So I hope that you musicians have much longer.
GLF: Recent composers keep getting better, but some composers, I’m just talking about classical music now, peaked really young. Mendelsohn’s best stuff was generally when he was younger. Several of them died when they were young. Schupert died when he was 31. And that guy was just magnificent, you know. 31 years old. Chopin was about 40. It’s unbelievable. Mozart was 36 or something. His quality never slacked off – it was just going all the time.
I am more aware of quality falling off because of career pressure. Kind of like that mystery writer. And for a variety of different reasons. One of the first things I did when I signed up with my agent was to look at all the other composers on their roster. I kind of looked at their whole lives, and there were some people that I could see, wow, they really figured it out. You could tell just by looking at the names of the pieces – what they were, how they were composed. I could read a lot between the lines – this person slowed down, you could see them suddenly take on too much work, like all of a sudden 40 pieces in one year, and then they decompress for five years after – really unhealthy. Or, just really consistent – you could just read between the lines.
And then there were other composers that really scared me. Their pieces got shorter, shorter, shorter, shorter, shorter. They started doing things like, maybe they wrote a short 3-4 minute thing, like a dozen string quartets, then after about 10-15 years of doing that, they took all those short little things and put them together. It’s embarrassing to have a bunch of short little things, because it sounds like you couldn’t hack a Beethoven-length string quartet, or they’re just gala pieces, for a special occasion for a rich donor, and they’re not real pieces of art. What they did with some of these short little things was put them together and call it a string quartet #1, and they were multi movement. Composed for completely different groups, completely different themes, and they just kind of Frankensteined them together. And it’s dishonest, you know, how that came about. They are going to give that to some string quartet who has to play it and it’s like a chapter from this book, a chapter from this book, a chapter from that book, and you’re left kinda cold. You may have admired the virtuosity in the moment of it, but it doesn’t work. I don’t think those pieces will stand the test of time. I mean, musicians keep playing stuff that resonates with them. So I saw some people try to survive the career pressures by doing that, and it gets you by day by day, but in the long term it’s a plateau.
In Part 5, Gabriela discusses being in the public eye.
